City's Boom Spurs a Need for Housing

Report Calls for Developing New Housing for City's Population Boom

The Gantry Park is located on the newly renovated waterfront in Long Island City, Queens.
Mark Abramson for The Wall Street Journal

By

Laura Kusisto

June 10, 2013 9:39 p.m. ET

In the coming decades, New York could confront a problem many cities would love to have: too many people and nowhere to put them.

The city is expected to add one million more residents by 2040, but there likely won't be room for hundreds of thousands of them unless a small city of new housing is built, according to a report by a Columbia University think tank.

The most logical location for all this new housing: the city's waterfront neighborhoods, including Long Island City and Willets Point in Queens, Red Hook in Brooklyn and the Financial District, according to the report by the Center for Urban Real Estate at Columbia University.

ENLARGE

Vishaan Chakrabarti, the center's director and an architect, said the city's current mega-projects, such as Hudson Yards on the Far West Side and Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, represent only "a drop in the bucket" in terms of the amount of housing that is needed.

"What surprised me most was the scale of the problem," Mr. Chakrabarti said. "It's a clarion call that we don't have enough housing."

The report said the city would reasonably reach a population of more than 9 million in less than 30 years, with the authors predicting that New York will remain a magnet for immigrants, artists and young professionals seeking their fortune. The growth is slightly slower than that predicted by the Bloomberg administration, which has said there will be a million more New Yorkers by 2030.

The report comes after nearly 12 years of large-scale redevelopment in the city. The Bloomberg administration has undertaken 119 rezonings, and a handful of high-profile rezonings have transformed industrial waterfront neighborhoods into residential areas with new 40-story towers.

Bloomberg administration officials said they have tried to balance the character of neighborhoods, the preservation of open space and the capacity of an area's transportation networks to absorb more people.

The Center for Urban Real Estate report's authors would pack more people into smaller areas than the Bloomberg administration has planned, placing them in waterfront real estate that is close to transit and to Manhattan, and has the potential for a high quality of life.

"It's clear that we have to figure out how to develop our waterfront but in a smart and resilient way," Mr. Chakrabarti said.

Whether residents want more apartments in their neighborhoods remains to be seen. In places such as Williamsburg where Bloomberg administration rezonings brought new residents, the result has been subway cars so packed that commuters wait for several trains to pass, lengthy kindergarten wait lists and promised parks that have yet to be delivered. The city has also yet to master the art of making tightly packed blocks of new glass towers feel like neighborhoods, rather than sterile enclaves.

In downtown Brooklyn, local City Council Member Letitia James said the new development has driven out working-class families.

"We've lost quite a few," she said. "We've done studies regarding parking, and yet no studies about the loss of affordable housing and the loss of moderate-income housing."

In Lower Manhattan, where a number of office buildings have been converted into new apartments, local officials balked at the Center for Urban Real Estate report's notion of adding some 10,000 new units—unless the area gets more schools.

The school-age population of the Financial District more than tripled between 2000 and 2010, U.S. Census Bureau data shows.

"We have one ball field in Battery Park City, which was damaged after Sandy. The soccer season was completely eliminated. Thanks to elected officials, it was back online just in time for Little League," said Catherine McVay Hughes, chairwoman of Community Board 1.

The Center for Urban Real Estate report's authors cautioned that the report is a planning tool and doesn't take into account the politics of zoning, which often requires the city and developers to strike compromises with the community on the bulk of new buildings.

"Politically the big developments are controversial and there are a lot of people who say we don't want our neighborhood character to change," Mr. Chakrabarti said. "Who's the voice of the New Yorkers who aren't here yet?"

Finding places for new people in the city isn't as simple as putting development in less-dense neighborhoods. More than a quarter of the city's housing is in single-family structures, meaning there's still plenty of room to go up to accommodate more people.

But in many of those areas prices aren't high enough to justify the cost of building new 40-story towers. It's unclear, for example, whether there's enough demand for the 10,000 to 15,000 units the report said could be accommodated along Queens Boulevard, a 12-lane thoroughfare through the heart of the borough.

That much of the development would be along the waterfront raises serious questions after superstorm Sandy, when residents in Lower Manhattan, Long Island City and Red Hook were out of their homes for weeks or months.

The report's authors said the need to prepare for future storms is actually an opportunity to create new residential construction as well.

"We need the infrastructure to prevent storm surges," said Jesse Keenan, the center's research director. "Why not build housing on top?"

Population growth isn't a bad problem for a city to have. New York's has climbed to more than 8.2 million in 2010 at the same time that Detroit's population, for example, declined to 713,777, its lowest point since 1910.

Still, the issue will pose a challenge for the city's next mayor. Under the assumptions in the report, the city will grow about 35% more quickly between now and 2040 than it did from 2000 to 2010.

Without a road map for development, Robert Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association, an urban planning think tank in Manhattan, said population growth would eventually become "a brake on the economic potential of the city."

Citing Yogi Berra, he said, "The place will become so crowded that nobody will go there anymore."

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